SUArt Galleries

August 20- September 27, 2015

During the late 1950s and early 1960s American Art had a huge impact around the globe. Artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist were creating images that captured the imagination of the art world, in general, and British artists, in particular. Peter Blake, Peter Phillips, and Joe Tilson, all students at the Royal College of Art during the late 1950s, embraced the direction that the American artists were taking and generated a body of work that looked at the cinema, comic book art, advertising, popular music and product packaging as sources for their art. Many of these artists felt that what they saw in museums and the traditional approaches to art taught in universities and art schools did not represent what they saw around them every day. They looked to develop an art that would speak to contemporary issues and reflect popular culture. At its core Pop Art was designed for a primarily youthful mass audience that was witty, cosmopolitan, and not offended by the consumer driven, mass-produced product that was becoming increasingly ubiquitous. This exhibition displays the work of British artists whose work, on canvas and in print, incorporated these sentiments.